Hey Nostradamus! (3 page)

 

In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun-kind of skinny and nutty and they mimicked the customers quite wickedly. They also didn't go to Delbrook, so they didn't have any history with me, which was a relief, and I felt guilty feeling this relief.
Youth Alive!
was concerned that my constant exposure to semiclad skin, sun and non-
Youth Alive!
members would make me revert to the World-as if listening to screaming babies and groping for the last purple Popsicle at the bottom of the freezer bin could be a test of faith or tempt me into secular drift. Lauren and Dee and some of the others visited me a bit too often, and I don't think a night ever went by without returning to my car at shift's end and finding an
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er eager to invite me to a barbecue or a hike or a Spirit Cruise around the harbor.

By the end of that August, Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his job up the coast, surveying for a mining company. A sample conversation from this period might go:

“Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it
was
right and good.”

“Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you'd been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?”

Well, of course he couldn't. There was only one way he could land what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said we could get married after graduation. I removed his hand from near my right breast and said, “God doesn't issue moral credit cards, Jason. He's not like a bank. You can't borrow now and pay later.”

“My strength-Cheryl, I'm losing it.”

“Then pray for more. God never sends you a temptation that you aren't strong enough to overcome.”

I did want Jason but, as I've said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God's terms. I'm not sure if I used God or He used me, but the result was the same. In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We're the sum of our decisions.

 

 

During none of my lunch-hour confessions, whether at the White Spot drive-in eating fries with the Bunch, or at an
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weekend seminar on kingdom building, did I ever once confess how much I needed Jason, in every sort of way. Even thinking of him made me drunk, and all the teenage girl stuff that came with it: bees needing flowers; wanting to dissolve like sugar into tea.

Of course, everybody else in the school was going at it like minks. Nothing was forbidden to them, so why not? It's indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels. And while the ever-present aura of casual sex saturated the school like
locker aroma, I didn't surrender to my own instincts, though I really did have to wonder why God makes teenagers so desperate. Why could we see Archie and Betty and Veronica on dates at the malt shop, but never screwing around in Archie's dad's basement covered in oil stains, spit and semen? Double standard. You can't do one without implying the other. Preachy me.

 

Dear Lord,

Protect our children, while they…Lord keep them as…Sorry. I can't pray right now.

 

Dear God,

What's hardest here is that I simply can't believe this is happening. Why do You make certain kinds of events feel real, but not others? Do You have a name for this? And could You please make all of this
feel real
?

 

As I was saying, silence.

In the first few moments of the attack, I remember briefly seeing a patch of sky out the window and I remembered how crisp and clean the day was.

Then one of the boys shot his gun in that direction and stemmed the exodus. I know nothing about guns. Whatever they were, they were powerful, and when they cocked them, it sounded industrial, like a machine stamping something flat.

Under the tables we all dove-
thumpa-thumpa-thump
.

Don't shoot at me-I'm not making any noise! Look! Look at How! Quiet! I'm! Being!

Shoot someone else over there! Shoot me? No! Way!

I could have stood up, shouted and caused a diversion and
saved a hundred people, or organized the lifting of our table to create a shield to ram into the gunmen. But I sat there like a meek little sheep and it's the only thing I've ever done that disgusts me. Silence was my sin. I sinned as I cowered and watched three pairs of ocher-colored work boots tromp about the room, toying with us as though we were bacteria under a magnifying lens.

I recognized all of the boys-working on the yearbook is good for that kind of thing. There was Mitchell Van Waters. I remembered seeing him down at the smoke hole by the parking lot with his fellow eleventh-grade gunmen, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle.

I watched Mitchell, Jeremy and Duncan walk from table to table. Take away the combat fatigues and they looked like the kid who mows your lawn or shoots hoops in the driveway next door. There was nothing physically interesting about them except that Mitchell was pretty skinny and Duncan had a small port-wine birthmark inside his hairline-I knew about this only because we'd been looking at photos as part of paste-up and layout during class.

As the three walked from table to table, they talked among themselves-most of what they said I couldn't make out. Some tables they shot at; some they didn't. As the boys came nearer to us, Lauren pretended to be dead, eyes open, body limp, and I wanted to smack her, but I was just mad at myself, perhaps more than anything for being afraid. It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that one up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else's blood trickling onto their leg.

 

 

One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness.
I write songs about horses; you make owl-shaped wall hangings; he combs his hair like some guy on TV; she knows the capital city of every country on earth
. Inasmuch as uniqueness is an arrogant human assumption, Jason was unique, and because of this, he was lovable. To me. First off, he was terrific with voices-ones he made up and ones he mimicked. As with the girls from my summer job, I was a sucker for anyone who could imitate others. Jason with even one beer in him was better than cable TV. He used his voices the way ventriloquists use their dummies-to say things he was too shy to say himself. Whenever a situation was boring and there was no escaping it-dinner with my family, or party games organized by Pastor Fields's wife that incorporated name tags and blindfolds-Jason went into his cat character, Mr. No, an otherwise ordinary cat who had a Nielsen TV ratings monitor box attached to his small black-and-white TV. Mr. No hated everything and he showed his displeasure by making a tiny, almost sub-audible squeaking
nee-yow
sound. I guess you had to be there. But Mr. No made more than a few painful hours a treat.

Jason could also wiggle his ears, and his arms were double-jointed-some of his contortions were utterly harrowing, and I'd scream for him to stop. He also bought me seventeen roses for my seventeenth birthday, and how many boys do you know who'd do
that
?

I was surprised when Jason did propose-in his dad's Buick on a rainy August afternoon in the White Spot
parking lot over a cheeseburger and an orange float. I was surprised first because he
did it,
then second because he'd concocted a secret plan that was so wild that only the deadest of souls could refuse. Basically, using money he'd stockpiled from his summer job, we were going to fly to Las Vegas. There in the car, he produced fake IDs, a bottle of Champale and the thinnest of gold rings, barely strong enough to retain its shape. He said, “A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.”

“Fake IDs?” I asked.

“I don't know the legal age there. They're for backup.”

I looked, and they seemed to be convincing fakes, with our real names and everything, with just the birth dates changed. And as it turned out, the legal age was eighteen, so we did need the fakes.

Jason asked me if I wanted to elope: “No big churchy wedding or anything?”

“Jason, marriage is marriage, and if it were as simple as pushing a button on the dash of this car, I'd do it right now.”

What I didn't go on about was the sexiness of it all. Sex-
finally
-plus freedom from guilt or retribution. My only concern was that Jason would develop chilly feet and blab to his buddies or Pastor Fields. I told him that blabbing would be a deal wrecker, and I made him vow, under threat-of-hell conditions, that this would be our secret. I'd also recently been reading a book of religious inspiration geared mainly to men, and I'd dog-eared the chapter that told its readers, essentially, to trust nobody. Friends are always betrayers in the end-everybody has the one person to whom they spill everything, and that special person isn't always the obvious
person you'd think. People are leaky. What kind of paranoid creep would write something like that? Well, whoever it was, it helped further my cause.

The important thing is that we were to marry in the final week of August in Las Vegas. I greased the skids at home and told my folks I was attending a hymn retreat up the coast; I told Lauren and the
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crew I was driving to Seattle with my family. Jason did the same thing. It was set.

 

Dear God,

I'm trying to take my mind off the slayings, but I don't know if that's possible. I'll forget about them for maybe a minute and then I'll remember again. I tried finding solace looking at the squirrels in the front yard, already gathering food for the winter-and then I got to thinking about how short their lives are-so short that their dreams can only possibly be a full mirroring of their waking lives. So I guess for a squirrel, being awake and being asleep are the same thing. Maybe when you die young it's like that, too. A baby's dream would only be the same as being awake-teenagers, too, to some extent. As I've said, I'm grasping here for some solace.

 

Lord,

I
know
I don't have a fish sticker, or whatever it is I'm supposed to have on my car bumper, like all those stuck-up kids who think they're holier than Thou, but I also don't think they have some sort of express lane to speak to You, so I imagine You're hearing this okay. I guess my question to You is whether or not You get to
torture those evil bastards who did the killings, or if it's purely the devil's job and You subcontract it out. Is there any way I can help torture them from down here on earth? Just give me a sign and I'm in.

 

What I now find odd is how Jason and I both assumed our marriage had to be a secret. It wasn't from shame, and it wasn't from fear, because eighteen is eighteen (well, almost) and the law's the law, so in the eyes of the taxman and the Lord, we could go at it like rabbits all day as long as we paid our taxes and made a few babies along the way. Sometimes life, when laid out plainly like this, can seem so simple.

What appealed to me was that this marriage was something the two of us could have entirely to ourselves, like being the only two guests in a luxury hotel. I knew that if we got engaged and waited until after high school to marry, our marriage would become something else-ours, yes, but not
quite
ours, either. There would be presents and sex lectures and unwanted intrusions. Who needs all that? And in any event, I had no pictures in my head of life after high school. My girlfriends all wanted to go to Hawaii or California and drive sports cars and, if I correctly read between the lines on the yearbook questionnaires they submitted, have serial monogamous relations with
Youth Alive!
guys that didn't necessarily end in marriage. The best I could see for myself was a house, a kid or two, some chicken noodle soup at three in the afternoon while standing at the kitchen sink watching clouds unfurl coastward from Vancouver Island.